Category Archives: Organizer Essays

Don’t let fear interfere with the the free and independent life that you’ve got planned out in your organizer. You don’t have to be afraid to go out at night. Violence can control both physical movement and limit the scope of our minds. Let’s get some ideas, get on with our lives, and learn how to defend ourselves. Women’s self defense projects grew out of feminist consciousness raising groups and incorporate personal experience with martial arts. Learning self-defense is empowering and liberating. Practice self-defense with friends, in classes, and in collectives. Support self-defense/domestic violence prisoners and learn about their cases. Shere these brief tips and stories about what has worked for you.

Start by developing the habit of paying attention to your surroundings. Try to be alert and ready, without panic or paranoia. Be careful about being preoccupied while on a cellphone or headphones.

Check out what the people around you are up to. Are they disturbed or angry? Where are their hands? Are they reaching for a weapon? Are they following you? Stereotypes and ignorance about a neighborhood or community will only make your situation worse. Become familiar with the places where you live and travel. Consider possible escapes, whether the area is inhabited or desolate.

Be aware of your own condition: are you upset, intoxicated, or sick? Take a deep breath and ground yourself before engaging in a situation. Relax your shoulders, and truly exhale.

Be ready to defend yourself in public or unfamiliar territory, as well as in your home or on your stomping grounds. Most attacks occur at home, and most attackers are intimate with survivors.

When inappropriate or aggressive behavior surfaces, confront it before the situation escalates. Trust your feelings—examine discomfort closely. Is someone crowding your comfort zone? A common barometer is whether they are close enough to kick or punch you. Set boundaries with words and gestures.

Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, speak loudly, and yell. Learn how to say “No, get away from me, stop following me, leave me alone.” Practice role-playing situations, practice yelling if it doesn’t come easily. If you are on a short fuse, learn to control your anger—don’t get baited into dangerous situations.

Avoid turning your back on an assailant.

Don’t carry weapons you don’t know how to use, and that an attacker could turn against you. Many items in your possession will be sufficient: keys, a lighter, a pencil, or a comb.

Strike to disable: poke at the eyes, punch at the throat, kick at the knees or groin. Remember that you are not trying to win a fight, only do enough damage to get away. Size and strength won’t keep you from escaping: consider how small a feral animal such as a fox can easily escape from a person’s grasp.

For women and trans self defense in the Bay Area contact Girl Army, 103 International Boulevard, Oakland CA (510) 496-3443

Mince vegetables as fine as humanly possible and saute in oil on low heat for 5-10 minutes until tender. Add beer and water and dissolve flour into liquid while it’s cold. Add all other ingredients and simmer on low heat for 20 minutes stirring periodically to avoid burning.

Tofu Eggless Salad

-1 lb. firm tofu

-4 sticks celery

-2 carrots

-1/2 c. coarsely chopped onion

-2 cloves garlic

-1/2 c. vinegar

-2 Tbsp nutritional yeast

-1 Ybsp mustard

-1 tsp pepper

-2 tsp salt

-2 Tbsp parsley

Finely mince vegetables, mash tofu with potato masher, and mix all ingredients in a owl. For better results, through everything in a food processor and blend thoroughly. Chill and serve.

The currently self-destructing system of corporate profit at the expense of human happiness and the environment props itself up by constantly selling us hope for the future as a substitute for transformation of the present. We need hope if we’re to keep struggling for a different world in the face of hostile and discouraging conditions, but we have t be careful to avoid the false hope that consumerism, the media, and mainstream politics always offer us: A new shining leader who will fix everything, if only we elect them. Dizzying new forms of techno-entertainment to take our minds off the crumbling economy and the dying planet. And lots of new stuff to buy—hybrid cars, “alternative” fuels, crap made from fair trade this and recycled that. If you can be thing, young, and beautiful through consumerism, surely you can be green too, right?

Let’s go back a step. The current political/economic/cultural system is not offering solutions to problems—it’s causing the problems. Under capitalism, constant competition forces everyone involved in the system to make decisions harmful to human beings and the earth. Every part of the system has to constantly increase profit, sales, efficiency, speed, and size, while reducing costs or risk being eaten up by someone else. The result is a race to the bottom—a sacrifice of the experience that make life worth living and the ecological systems that make life possible.

The system’s own internal logic of constant growth is inconsistent with a finite and fragile natural environment. Since the industrial revolution, human civilization has brought the world’s natural systems to the brink of collapse. Global warming is only the most stark example. Look at the rivers, the oceans, the forests, the air, the soil, wildlife—will your children’s natural world be better or worse than yours?

You might think that with all the technology and abundant material possessions that capitalism has created at the expense of the earth’s environment, people in developed countries would be the happiest in the history of the world. But capitalism—with its constant competition and insatiable appetite for more—corrodes the human spirit and human cultures just as surely as it destroys the natural environment. We have undergone the greatest speed-up in the history of the world. Time to spend with our families, time to be in nature, time to learn about the world for its own sake, time to make music, time to master a craft, time to just sit and be still—capitalism rations it all. Communities, family ties, our health and sanity are all sacrificed on the altar of More. The industrial economy crushes diversity, autonomy, local decision making, and free choice—instead, you get 10,000 identical Starbucks, processed frozen treas, and programmed mass culture. Workers always get the hardest deal—in sweatshops in China or closed factories in the USA—but even the “lucky” people in capitalism, inhabit a culturally, ecologically, and spiritually poor cage. The modern world is the ugliest, saddest, dirties, and most stressful and dangerous place humans have ever created.

In the face of this absurd system, people are organizing everywhere for different ways of living. While the system concentrates power in distant hands, we seek forms of organization that re-localize decision making—putting control of our lives back into our own hands and the hands of people we can speak with face-to-face. While the system worships competition and creates a pressure-filled world in which every individual is pitted against every other individual, we are building alternatives based on cooperation, trust, and mutual aid. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The system makes assumptions about individual psychology that just aren’t true: that everyone is inherently selfish, greedy, violent, and values material possession over time to enjoy our lives. We’re observing how people actually help each other out, how we have compassion for others, and how our time is more valuable than having a bunch of stuff. While the system seeks to promote individual isolation—living alone in suburbs, driving alone to a job, working alone in a box—we’re re-discovering our social nature. People have always lived together with others, cooperated to meet our needs, and caroused and sang late at night around a campfire. While the system always seeks more and faster stuff, we’re re-learning the richness and joy of being slow, low-tech, and simple.

All of these transformations lighten our impact on the natural world while making our day-to-day existence more meaningful, engaged, and connected with others. People have been organizing for these alternatives for a long time—some are described in the pages of this organizer—they don’t match neatly with our learned short-attention span in which plots are resolved in a half-hour tv episode. And yet, whole the transformation we’re building is a long-term project, it doesn’t require that we replace action now with a vague—or false—hope for the future. Because real social transformation is not about hoping for the future, but changing the way we live now. Real social transformation isn’t something that someone else does for you—a leader, a company selling you a new product, or a celebrity offering you entertainment. Real transformation is strictly do-it-ourselves. It is unmediated by the system of buying, passively watching or waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Part of real transformation—maybe the most important part—is within your own heart and your own head: freeing yourself from the fog, lies, and distractions offered by the outside—form buying, accomplishing stuff, or getting approval from someone else. Satisfaction and meaning can only come from within. Once you realize that you’re responsible for your own life, you are free to seek liberation from corporations, landlords, bosses, church leaders, teachers, and politicians.

Ultimately, the struggle against the system a struggle that we must make together. There is no single plan, no single solution, no single cause, no single alternative technology or form of organization that will bring liberation. But by trying many different ideas, struggles, and experiments, people just like you—probably including you—are developing alternatives in the here and now and for the future. We should pat ourselves on the back, celebrate our victories, and keep on keeping on. The future we seek starts right now.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the main human-generated atmospheric gas causing climate change, CO2 is dumped into the air every time fossil fuels (oil, gasoline, natural gas, coal) are burned. Individual people burn fossil fuels in their daily lives—by driving cars, using electricity, and eating animal-based diets—and the society as a whole burns fuels to run industry—growing food, manufacturing products, transporting goods. You can get a rough feeling for how much your different activities contribute to global warming by using this carbon calculator. By estimating your emissions, you can see how you compare with the “average” and think about ways to reduce your personal emissions. To reduce societal societal emissions will require collective actions to force industries, government, and institutions to reduce fossil fuel dependence and create alternatives.

Standing up against oppression is righteous, but risky, behavior. It’s hard work, both physically and emotionally. A much too large percentage of activists burn out and disappear from their communities because the frustrations and injuries from fighting an uphill battle, of which we may never ourselves reap the rewards, can be demoralizing and traumatic. Sharing our feelings about the difficulties of working on the frontlines is a crucial form of solidarity and friendship.

CRISIS RECOVERY

Society provides few options for people in crisis other than mental hospitals, religion, and psychiatric drugs. The value of freedom, love, and community do not end when you’re in crisis. In fact, they can save your life. The key is empowerment—What do you feel really helps? Examples:

-A mutual support group is simply peers listening to and helping peers as equals—validating, if not “endorsing” feelings. You can learn to form one yourself. Or ask community resource organizations for lists of ongoing groups. Shop around: some groups push the mainstream, disempowering, medication-based mental health system. Though in a pinch, finding any group may be helpful for validation of your situation if you find yourself without any support.

-Practicing meditation or spiritual disciplines may help you relax. However, joining a cult is not therapeutic, so take care not to have your vulnerability exploited by a seemingly perfectly nice bunch of people who promise to rescue you.

-Try to remember to breathe.

-Ecopsychology is realizing that nature and wilderness are our greatest healers. Spend some time outside the city to get centered and get away from pollution, which is in itself mind-altering.

-There is no shame in using psychiatric drugs if you know that they work for you.

-Many communities have 24/7 crisis hotlines or crisis centers. You can call 800-SUICIDE if you’re thinking about killing yourself or 800 646-HOPE to reach a local rape crisis line for survivors of sexual violence.

-Socail change: Actually address the stressful factors in your environment. Revolution can heal. If you have a loved one in crisis, consider asking them if you and/or their counselor can hold an emergency gathering potluck to weave together their mutual support network of trusted friends—and find out what they truly need at this crucial time. However, don’t act over their heads.

CRISIS PREVENTION

Everyone will eventually have a crisis. For example, if you love deeply, you may one day grieve deeply. The questions is “are you prepared for a crisis?” It is a good idea to develop your network of support, now. Modern society isolates. Some day you may need a shoulder you can trust to weep on.

EVADE THE BRAIN POLICE

If you find yourself threatened with psychiatric coercion, it’s a good time to get rea calm, real fast. Authorities—shrinks, doctors, cops, schools—tend to provoke, and then diagnose your “reactions” of fear, despair, and anger. So when they provoke, act even more calm. Know your rights, get a lawyer, and find real help soon.

The Official History of the World gets written by those in power to stifle change by making the power structure appear inevitable and natural. But history is filled with examples of people who rejected the system of private ownership and power and built alternatives based on cooperation, sharing, and communal land ownership. The Diggers movement in England is an early—and thus remarkable—example of collective action that inspires free thinkers to this day. Its memory is preserved largely because of the eloquent pamphlets it published.

English Diggers

In April 1649, as food prices reached an all-time high, unemployed laborers and landless peasants began to dig up common land and plant vegetables on Saint George’s Hill, near Surrey, England. Gerrd Winstanley and friend invited “all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes.” They decided to pull down fences and property boundaries and invite others to come and work with them. The Diggers—because they dug up the land—envisioned that if the landless people of England formed self-supporting communes, the land-owning classes would become pointless. The elite would be forced to join the communes or starve, as there wouldn’t be anyone left to work their fields or pay rent to them for use of their property.

When the local landowners caught wind of what was going on, they first sent troops and when they failed to remove the Diggers, they organized gangs to attack them. Many Diggers were beaten and a communal house was set on fire. After the landowners won a court case to evict the Diggers, they left St George’s Hill to avoid attack from the army. Within 2 years, the movement was totally dispersed.

Winstanley argued that private property, but especially land as the source of all wealth, “is the cause of all wars, bloodshed, theft, and enslaving laws that hold the people under miserie.” He believed that if the diggers could cultivate the commons and wastelands, the example would be so infectious that all the poor of England would join the Diggers.

The Digger pamphlets present no plan for administrative or governmental policy. Winstanley assumed that the example of small groups working in occupied land in brother and sister-hood would sweep all before it and convert England and eventually the world. The problems of self-defense and internal disruption were answered with total pacifism before which, he hoped, power would simply dissolve. The violent suppression of the Diggers by both mob and authority forced Winstanley to consider the question of power anew. Was his utopia a workable policy? To this day, radicals, socialists, and anarchists all claim Winstanley as an ancestor.

Modern Diggers

In the 1960s, modern Diggers in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California and New York promoted a vision of society free from private property and all forms of buying and selling. The modern Diggers combined street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the park—an obvious precursor to Food Not Bombs—and distributing “surplus energy” at a series of Free Srores where everything was free for the taking. The Free Store was where “reality came to change its wardrobe.” Soldiers from Vietnam, who had gone A.W.O.L. would head to the Free Store, entre in full military uniform, and leave looking like any other hippie on the street, often carrying a new ID as well. Through their underground movement, the Diggers created the first Free Medical Clinic.

Check out Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan/ Planet Drum Foundation founded by former Digger Peter Berg. Leon Rosselson set the English Diggers original words to music. Bands Chumbawumba and Billy Bragg also have versions of the songs.

Mix ingredients in small jar with fork or whisk until mustard and molasses are dissolved. Ideally, let stir for at least 30 minutes to allow garlic oil to seep into mixture. Great for salads, marinades, or dipping sauces. And of course, it always tastes better dumpstered, and organic!

Vegan Chocolate Cake

-½ lb. silken tofu

-3/4 c. oil

-1 Tbsp potato flour

-1 ¾ c. water

-1 ¾ c. sugar

-1 ½ tsp. sugar

-1 ½ tsp. vanilla

-1/2 tsp. salt

-1 c. unsweetened cocoa

-3 ¼ c. unbleached flour

-2 tsp. baking soda

In a food processor, blend oil, 1 cup of the water, tofu, and potato flour until smooth. Then, in a large bowl, combine contents of food processor, the remaining water, sugar, vanilla, salt, and cocoa. Add flour and baking soda and mix until smooth. Grease and powder with cocoa a 9×13 inch pan or two 9-inch cake pans. Bake in a 375 degree oven for 25-30 minutes. Test with a toothpick in the center. It it comes out clean, the cake is done.

Vegan Death by Chocolate Pie

-2 c. chocolate chips

-1 Tbsp. soy milk

-1 tsp. vanilla

-Two 12 oz. packages of silken tofu.

For crust:

-1 ½ c. pecans or walnuts

-8 pitted dates

-1/2 tsp vanilla extract

-1/4 tsp cinnamon

-2 Tbsp water

Crust: Blend the nuts in a food processor. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend until it all sticks together. Maybe add more water. Spoon into a pie pan and shape it flat and crust-like. You can bake the crust if you want for one hour at 200 degrees and make it crispy.

Filling: Put the chocolate chips and soymilk in a saucepan and melt them on medium heat, stirring until smooth. Put the chocolate sauce in a food processor with the tofu and vanilla and blend until whipped smooth and creamy. Add more soymilk if needed. Pour the pie stuff into the crust and chill in the fridge for 3-4 hours.

For all of us who yearn for a different reality, remembering the old Chinese curse, “May you get hat you want and live in interesting times,” could be handy. How many of us can live, even for a short time, without the crutches of capitalist technology, whether after an earthquake, hurricane, fascist takeover, or insurrection? Here are some thoughts on what you could stash to make life a bit easier in the face of large-scale catastrophes, a DIY Apocalypse Survival Kit. This list assumes California Bay Area weather, so adjust to your local weather extremes*

In your med kit:

-gloves

-1” medical tape

-4×4 sterile gauze pads

-assorted bandaids

-tweezers

-dental floss (for stitches and tourniquets)

-disinfectant (bactine, peroxide, or high proof liquor—which is also good for fire or sedation)

-painkillers of choice

-Yunnan paiyou (Chinese herb to stop bleeding)

-burn salve and skin salves

-menstrual pads (they can be used like gauze)

-condoms

-herbal or homeopathic remedies

In a pack (prep bag):

-compass (learn to use it!)

-multitool/pocket knife

-lighters or strike-anywhere matches

-goggles

-extra layer of clothes

-sturdy belt

-headlamp

-batteries

-camera—to document injury or police brutality

-sewing kit/safety pins

-duct tape or packing tape

-sharpie and paper

-high calories food (peanut butter! Chocolate!)

-drinking water

-sunscreen and chapstick

-toothbrush

For your bike satchels:

-repair/patch kit

-cord/bungee, rope, etc.

-carabineers

-water filter or iodine

-preserved food, including some kind of comfort food (dried mangoes, pudding cups) to ease depression, especially with young kids who may refuse to eat during traumatic circumstances.